


Night Out

by AbelQuartz



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Art, Based on a Tumblr Post, Bus, California, F/M, Gen, Holding Hands, Inspired by Art, Late Night Conversations, Late at Night, Literal Sleeping Together, Mornings, POV First Person, Philosophy, Plans For The Future, Poetry, Present Tense, Skateboarding, Sushi, Swearing, Teen Romance, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:20:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28264536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AbelQuartz/pseuds/AbelQuartz
Summary: Two teenagers, Steven and Connie, spend a night on the town.West coast vibes. A city that's always been sleeping. A place that's always been dreaming. It's a dream of itself. The sound of wheels running down the sidewalk make a metronome out of motion. Someone has to move.Based on art by Kerry (suf-fering), used with permission <3
Relationships: Connie Maheswaran & Steven Universe, Connie Maheswaran/Steven Universe
Comments: 4
Kudos: 32





	Night Out

**Author's Note:**

> Each section is based off of a specific illustration. The story is intended to contextualize and connect the pieces in order. Follow along and follow suf-fering if you'd like more awesome stuff! All art used on this page has been allowed by the artist from their original post, for which I am eternally grateful. 
> 
> ORIGINAL POST: suf-fering.tumblr.com/post/638140043198971904/night-out

* * *

It’s 10:02 PM.

The hard part isn’t the balance, but holding onto her. Where do I look? The ground’s moving, her hands are still, and she’s laughing and moving the air around her. Connie loves the downhill, and I had to remind her why it’s a bad idea to do this on the Olive Street decline. Instead, we’re in the middle of the parking lot off of the west exit ramp.

There used to be plans for a hardware store here, but they got bought out by another company, I guess, and the last time the building was renovated it was for a kid’s amusement area, some token arcade where people could have birthday parties and play ten-year-old claw games. Dad never took me to those places, and he said it was because they were loud and gaudy and gave him headaches, and he’d rather spend time with me. I know the real reason, but I wouldn’t tell him. The Maheswarans probably never took Connie because of the diseases and fatty foods, all greasy pizza and stale chewing gum in the prize case. It doesn’t matter now, now that there’s nothing left but a red roof facade and the outline of a cartoon face, outlined on the brickwork like the etching of a nuclear blast. It’s a dead place, a quiet zone. I feel like we’re the only life here, drifting in and out of white pools on the blacktop.

All the streetlights are there, though, and I know that the city’s keeping them on to watch for kids like us. There’s no difference in motion as my wheels pass over unintelligible graffiti, neon blue names and arrows. Between the grid are catalogued all the parking spaces, some semblance of order. Everything is ordered, the way that the parking lot is a rectangle, aligned with the building, aligned with the street, aligned with the gas station and laundromat on the other side of the road.

I’m aligned with Connie, but we’re traversing the light in different ways, in circles. I don’t know where to put my feet when we need to move forwards, when we need to kick off. One of us will always be goofy when we’re traveling together. I’m studying the ground too hard. Connie laughs, and she’s looking off in one direction, turning with our bodies. I don’t want the wheels to get caught up. We’re supposed to be moving forward, and I’m trying, I really am.

 _You’re tense,_ she says, pulling at my hands, and she knows this embarrasses me. _Or like,_ she says, _you gotta be more fluid if we want to get anywhere. I know, I’m trying. I just don’t want either one of us to get hurt,_ I say. She laughs again.

I met her with kneepads, before I could balance. I was on a scooter, she was on the ramp. That skatepark’s somewhere by the community center, in a cardinal direction I don’t recognize. Even though there are only four places to choose from, I can never remember which side it’s on. That skatepark is like this parking lot, a place located somewhere else, where nobody cares how it’s found or where it is. If you know where the skatepark is, you can go there and hang out and drink fruit punch out of a box. If you know where the parking lot is, it’s just a place on your way somewhere else in the city, a meaningless landmark. But no landmark is meaningless, right? They have to tell you where you’re going.

Stopping here is part of the liminal experience, or she said something like that when we came. We’re traveling in that now, two fish in a tank, and she reaches out as we approach a post, gripping the yellowed concrete and shoving us off. We can keep our feet pointed towards each other. Once we start to travel, she returns the grip, holding my hands together again, and we both smile as the shadows pass over and under our legs. 

* * *

It’s 11:46 PM.

Wasabi makes my stomach hurt. I do love that specific taste, and there’s something about ginger, something special in the pickling process, all the spiky mouth-feels. It’s not actually spiky, I know, but that’s what it would be like if taste was a texture, if there was something translatable between what I have in my mouth and what I’m visualizing. Connie doesn’t understand exactly what I mean but she goes along with it, or at least she listens. Salty soy sauce browns the rice, dark to darker in the shadow of my body. The grocery store’s open until midnight, and I’m just letting the wheels rest in the tile. They’ll fill the pool back up once the season begins again. Park security leaves us alone.

I started high school with the intent on becoming a vegetarian since there really wasn’t any reason not to, and suffering just became part of the conversation naturally. Meat isn’t that important to me. The more we ate the more I stopped caring about those sorts of things, and I’m not sure when I stopped. Pepperoni wasn’t on the top of my list, but I had to eat lunch that day and I couldn’t skip it. Juice and fruits and pasta and broccoli and all the protein shakes in the world couldn’t substitute the fact that something was dying for my food. Soy and quinoa deprive native people of their food sources when they’re shipped internationally and mass-produced for profit. Acres of farmland kill mice and insects and ground birds in the teeth of combine harvesters. I want to believe that every life is precious and then I think about the concrete we’re sitting on, the edge of the pool, the water that’s sitting where it shouldn’t be. We’re on top of a wasteland now, the city is a wasteland, we’re all living in steel and fabrication. Being human means that we live in a way that crushes others. Small pieces help, though, the little things that feel like they’re making a difference. Small lives, our lives. It’s not dissimilar.

Raw fish still tastes weird to me, but it’s less consciously awful than eating cooked meat. I let the tuna rest in my mouth for a second, even though the texture of the flesh is soft, almost sultry, questioning this finale. You have to chew it all together with the rice and sauce and get everything together, and then you can let it go. Cooked meat has met fire, artificial fire. Would a vegetarian eat an animal burned up in the grassland, after lightning struck the plains? There’s nobody in charge of the suffering then, nobody who slit its throat, nobody who trussed it over the embers. I don’t want to think about anything dying, but I know that there’s death as much as there is life out there. I swallow.

Connie’s getting us drinks, something we forgot before we came out here. I know which pieces she’ll like. I’m splitting it, almost in half, so that she gets one more piece, technically two with the even number. When we were kids, I was obsessed with the idea of life, and crushed by the notion that it would end. We talked about that a lot when middle school ended, when we were worried about being separated and the questions of private school. No more bus rides home. No more water in the pool. No more sushi.

I look over my shoulder. She’ll be done soon. If she isn’t, we have our phones, but I don’t want to bother her. We have to be wary of each other’s time. I’m the kind to text when she’s busy, she’s the kind to forget our messages. Nights like this are strange, or at least I think they are. We’ve never had a night like this. Everyone’s out of town. Everyone’s somewhere where they’re not watching us. We’re trusted to make good choices. I’m the kind to eat when I’m not hungry just to keep my mouth busy. Dad’s going to be back in the morning, but I’ll be staying the night, I think. There’s a piece of wasabi jammed underneath my upper right canine.

* * *

It’s 12:20 AM.

 _We can talk about college when we get there, Steven._ I don’t have a response, but I know she can sense something on my tongue. Sometimes it’s words. She looks forward, her backpack swinging against her t-shirt as she pulls me towards the south side.

I look around, and I don’t recognize this place from the sidewalk. The main road is another street down, and the houses and businesses here are typical west coast fare; it could be anywhere in the south, anywhere near the border. 

_But it’s not just about college,_ I say. _Being here with you, it’s just, I’m thinking about the future a lot. I’m sorry, I know we haven’t gotten deep with that shit, but I’m worried. I’m worried a lot. You know me._

She does. We step onto the incline. The businesses here were built on the hilly side of the state, far enough away from the coast that the land’s comfortable being anything but flat and awful. Neither of us live too far away from the sea, although it’s far enough that we can’t smell the salt and bacterial sulfurs. There are buildings on hills, random slopes, raised parking lots to the Mexican restaurant, storm drains engineered to be at the exact right angle for the storms that never come, maybe for when hurricanes roll in once in a hundred years. The parking garage ahead is monolithic and not used as much as it would appear. I think there was supposed to be an airport nearby that was scrapped. So much of this city is filled with dead ideas. The buildings are like headstones to all the prosperity that we didn’t really need in the first place. I’m prospering, a little. I might be questioning if that’s a word but at least I’m trying. I know Connie’s doing well, and she tells me that, and either way it’s easier when we’re together. The lights are brighter here, not as bright as the mall closer to the capitol but bright enough that I can see her ahead of me, where her feet are hitting the cracks on the sidewalk, the stitches on the sleeves of her shirt. I can make out the shadows on the back of her knees, the little places where the muscles are tight against the skin. I’m distracted enough that I forget she’s quiet.

 _So what is it?_ she says. _Do you think I’m just going to stop being your girlfriend if I get accepted somewhere?_ I want to correct her and say when instead of if but she sighs. _Steven, I don’t care about the future right now. I dragged you out so we could have just tonight. I want to just be in the moment for_ once.

_Doesn’t make the worry go away._

_Then you’re just going to have to trust me._

I don’t say anything, because I know whatever I say will be contrarian, in protest, and she doesn’t want or need that right now. Neither do I. My legs are tense from walking all night, even though we’re resting. I did talk to her about one worry I had before, about the skateboard tucked under my arm. Once I got a feeling for balance, then I couldn’t help but feel it everywhere, when I was standing, sitting, lying down. I wondered about falling over wherever I was. Distractions like the ramp, like the kickflip, they come naturally now, as all distractions do. Still, sometimes I get off the board and look up to the sky and all that blue just makes the blood run from my head. I look up now, just for a second, before she looks back at me and sees what I’m trying. The sky is red in the dead of morning, not because of the clouds or a storm, but as a reflection of the neon below, man-made projection, a sea made of civilization.

* * *

It’s 1:17 AM.

Nobody cares if you’re screaming anymore. I never ask for facts about the crime rate, and I know there’s bias, there’s all that bullshit around. I’m seventeen, I’m sitting in an abandoned GreenMart shopping cart, and Connie’s wheeling me down a road with no homes. This side of the city has stretches of road banked by sand that doesn’t belong here. We don’t belong here either, but we’re moving, we’re going, all kinds of motion under the stars. I think we’re under the stars, but again, yeah, city lights. That’s the worst of it, and the best of it; we can make our own constellations out of filaments, characterize the eternal legends of our time and slap their points of articulation on the blinking OPEN lights of a sports bar, where cigarettes die like fireflies. Who cares when we’re alive.

We’re exhausted, or at least I am, and Connie’s in the place—like when she’s studying, and it’s almost midnight on a school night, and she’ll get all the energy to organize her notes by color or to make a non-denominational playlist for a holiday coming up that neither one of us celebrate. I have to tell her to go to bed then, but not tonight. We took the bus together from the city, we talked all the way down, we got our drinks, and we’re here, with the Mexican glass bottles clinking in Connie’s backpack as she runs, with the cans from the grocery store, our midnight snack, and they’ll go into the recycling bin once we get home. 

She’s made of sound. She’s made of her flats as they pound the pavement, rubber and weight with the same legs she uses to hone in on tennis balls, to push the deck over the lip, to step on my toes when I’m passing love notes to her in class. The top of the deck is used to her feet, but the boards are in the cart with me now, rattling, wheels on wheels. Her breath is ragged and beautiful, a song of paradise. Paradise is made of steel and bent in pyretic rectangles, lit from above. And her laugh, her laugh may as well be the seventh fucking seal, because it breaks me, t breaks my voice and I’m too tired to stop it. The wind tries to overcome and it’s got nothing on us at all. There’s resistance, and we break through, and we’re not talking. Words become sounds become strings become lost.

There are no street signs, no greenery to recognize, and it’s all blurred in my eyes. If I were to cry, I wouldn’t know. These aren’t my tears anymore, these aren’t my eyes. I’m raising my hands like my father at his first concert. My legs stick out of the cage and it’s the roller coaster of a lifetime, and she’s pushing me, Connie’s pushing me and if I know anything then I love her. If there is a single thought, it’s that, it’s the last thing I have left. I want her to push me into the empty street. I want us to go down the Olive Street hill forever and crash into the sea with her on my heels.

So maybe we’ll see people again. Maybe this won’t last forever, and it won’t, and we’ve seen it all, seniors who become substitute teachers, parents who retire, money that dries up, the hollow skeletons of birds who don’t know to stay away from the fast lane off Route 400. So maybe she can’t go faster than the speed of sound, but I’m grateful, because I’ll hear her behind me until the pavement turns crowded again and we’re watched, and we have to pretend to be human. Tonight, before I can slow down and let the cells collide, I want to become speed. I want to hear that rattling as we cross over all the cracks and bumps in this city, every nameless square inch; I want to run it all over. We’ve made it past the need for names, for words. The state of nature doesn’t know about shopping carts or sneakers or skateboards or anything that they bring, not the boy inside or the pulse of running, or the feeling of wind on my face drying salt on my cheeks.

* * *

It’s 3:00 AM.

Or maybe it’s not. My phone died a long time ago. Connie doesn’t need to check hers if I’m with her and her parents are going to bed at their usual time. Someday we’re going to be old, maybe old together. Someday we’re going to share a giant uncomfortable bed that’s high off the ground with bathrobes hanging off the corners.

I swear I can see the sun’s rings this early. Not rings like Saturn, rings like the light around the Earth, the bands of our hamster sphere. I haven’t called the hemisphere that since I was is second grade, but Connie keeps reminding me whenever we talk about space. It makes sense, right? It’s enclosed around us.

Right now I can’t see anything. I’m buried in her collarbone. I want to be asleep so badly but this is good, this is just goodness, where we are. The bus is smooth as it takes us over the roads that were made for kids like us, roads that haven’t seen the light of heavy traffic. We’re enclosed again, in a different way, in steel and rectangular billboards scratched off and painted on again. The last one I saw had a drink commercial for something that hasn’t been printed since the 90’s. The whole bus is clean in its own way. Paper outweighs gum. There aren’t any signs of people keeping their belongings stored here, no cubbies carved away, and there’s minimal graffiti, little swirls done by artists who don’t have licenses, names in permanent black marker on the back windows. No phone numbers, no racial slurs, just little pieces of art and names. I don’t know who cleans buses. We take a full corner and the brakes let out a breath.

I don’t know how she’s asleep right now, or even if she’s truly asleep. One leg’s bent over mine, one’s tucked under her, and she’s got one arm curled up, and I’m holding her, breathing in. Intimacy keeps me awake. We haven’t talked about anything yet, no plans for when her parents are away. We don’t need to, and if we did then maybe we could be honest. A kiss is enough to make her smile and to shatter me every night for hours. I’m allured by my own volition. I’m taken in like a stray dog. But she doesn’t like me talking about it this way. I love my poetry, I love my metaphors, and that’s all I can feel and say. In my head, she’s pragmatic, responding to my love letters of stammering with her own solid hand. I can hear her tell me just how much it means to say these things. I haven’t stopped, but I write it down in class when I’m supposed to be taking notes. Next year, we’ll be applying for schools, and I won’t get in. I know my grades, I know where I am.

I’m going to invent a degree. The bus revs just for a moment to get up one of the hills, and my forehead is warmed by the crook of her neck. When I go to school, I’m going to be my own teacher. Connie’s going to be my subject, and I’ll learn the names of every place she wants me to kiss her, the angles of our fingers as we hold hands and pretend that her parents don’t notice every time we get together for weekend studies. I’ll craft a theory of how does love hurt this much in the very physical sense when at the same time the way she runs her hands through my hair relaxes every tense muscle I’ve ever stretched. I’ll write a library of romantic litanies in three-ring binders and spiral notebooks from the bargain bin, dissecting cadavers of every argument we’ve had since we knew how to yell at each other, giving a dissertation on the particles that emerge from the tightness of every make-up hug.

Connie’s t-shirt is loose around her shoulder and slipping with the bumps. I hold on to her arm tightly and hold in a sigh. Her skin smells like gravity.

* * *

It’s 9:59 AM.

If it wasn’t for the rolling, we would have forgotten the skateboards on the bus, or we would have picked them up and forgot the backpack, and either way now there are dirt stains on Connie’s couch where we dumped our stuff before passing out on the bed. I remember waking up with her. I remember a moment of fear, and then relief at the feeling of denim indentations in my thighs. Next time I’ll bring a change of clothes. I want to take a shower. I want to hold onto the windowsill to stop the thoughts of falling out to the street.

Connie looks tired, and feels tired, and she says, _Christ I’m still tired._ I say, _We spent a whole night out and got like no sleep._ She smiles, and even that’s tired. The human body isn’t meant to show happiness every time it feels it, when the muscles don’t want to comply, and that’s okay. She tugs the blanket a little and looks at nothing in the street. I’m trying to find something on the horizon but my eyes won’t focus. We both need to rest more, but it’s going to throw off our sleep cycles again. We have another full day, and then some.

 _Are you hungry?_ I ask. Connie doesn’t say anything immediately, then shrugs. _We can stay in tonight and rest, I say, and I’ll make you something. An omelet. Bell peppers. Garlic salt._

 _Do you think we’ll ever be okay?_ she asks. I don’t know what that means, and she knows I don’t know what that means. _I love you, Steven. I want this all to work. I wake up and do my homework and listen to lectures and God, I’m not allowed to ask why. Sometimes I want to give it all up and just do what we did last night, every night. What’s that feeling?_

_Why are you asking me? I don’t know shit._

She bites the inside of her cheek. _But you do. And you did it without giving up._ She’s holding my wrist. I know that she could break someone’s arm with those fingers, snap the radius like a rabbit’s neck. _Not everyone grows up loving the people they grow up with, and I did, and maybe I’m fried but I think I know why, and it’s because last night, I saw you trying to just be, because I had to try, and you know what? I think you were always like that. You don’t have to justify who you are or how you feel, you just think about it, reflect on it, you make it look so easy to exist._

 _It’s not,_ I say, _more quickly than I intend. It’s not easy, I don’t want to make it look easy._

_You make it look like life’s worth living just for the hell of it._

_Isn’t it?_

She doesn’t let go of my wrist right away. The sun’s warm on her wrist. I scoot over to her, and I take my hand away. With the blanket I can feel the static electricity as I move my arm around Connie’s waist. Her eyes are still looking away from mine, but she knows I’m watching her now, watching her heart pump endorphins and uncertainty up to her brain. I know she took her contacts out. I know she tied her bun from muscle memory. I know that she woke up before me and stroked my cheeks. Our bare heels are barely grazing the brickwork. She said she loved me, I remember that much, in between the smears of light and faded blackness of the Pacific sky. Connie opens her mouth again, but her teeth come together, and then her lips, and then her eyes close again. We’re both ready to sleep again. Her finger teases a hole in the bottom of my t-shirt. I know the smell of her heartlines. To the city, we both smell like moonburnt polyurethane. 

* * *


End file.
